


Three Little Words

by WeirdnessCat



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, Feels, M/M, Overthinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-18
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-11-02 08:54:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20690633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WeirdnessCat/pseuds/WeirdnessCat
Summary: Ever woken up in the wee small hours?





	Three Little Words

They’ll never say those three little words. And that stings. (It doesn’t hurt. The years have redefined ‘hurt’ for him. This isn’t hurt. But still.) 

They never say it. And he gets why, gets that bad things happen to those who hear it. How those who speak it can open themselves to a lifetime of anxiety as they ponder what fate they may have bestowed on the unsuspecting and undeserving recipient. It’s too great a responsibility to utter that particular incantation, that abracadabra, knowing that it could bring death, not rabbits, from their black hat.

So, no, they’ll never say it, never wave the magic wand over that empty hat, lest they let fate know exactly how best to destroy them.   
He’ll never say those three little words. Or hear them.

But he’d known that going in.

Back then, of course, he hadn’t thought it would ever be an issue. It shouldn’t have been, because whatever this was going to be, whatever they were starting, those words would never be a part of that. How could they be? It wasn’t going to last. Obviously. It wasn’t ever going to be a long-term thing. Nothing serious. Nothing … permanent. He wouldn’t ever have that. He wasn’t lucky. Not like that. Luck had always been measured on the negative axis for him.

And yet … He had been lucky – he was. Every day. How had that happened?

In the beginning, in those days of crippling disbelief and heady novelty, he’d accepted that it would be over by Thanksgiving, then Christmas. It couldn’t last, it wouldn’t. Why would someone like that hitch their wagon to someone like him? They shouldn’t, not after everything he’d done, everything he caused, everything he’d become. He’d been under no illusion; he was just a convenient tree of rough bark that passing creatures used to relieve an itch, or themselves.

No, when it fizzled out, when the passion was spent, they’d go their separate ways. They’d both move on.

Except … 

Yeah, he’d known then, hadn’t he? That there was no coming back from this for him. There would be no moving on for him. He would walk away, head held high, eyes blazing, defiant and blasé all at once. But he would be hollow, destroyed and rotting, like a diseased oak, felled by a storm with the force of a primeval hurricane. 

Yet, at some point, he came to realise that if he was ever gifted with half a chance with this man, however slim, however fleeting, he was going to grab it in both hands and hold on for dear life, those consequences be damned. (He’d been told that his self-preservation skills needed work.) 

So, he’d gone in, eyes open, fully expecting the rug to be yanked violently from under him. That’s what he was used to; that’s what he deserved. Even as his lips responded to that first press, that’s what he had braced himself for. For the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ rejection; the gentle let down. Or the not so gentle take down. His subsequent fall down.

So, he’d waited. Waited for the other shoe to tumble down.

It never had.

Sure, they’d come close on the surface; the bitter arguments, the storming out, nights spent away while they both cooled down. Later, they would apologise and make promises they both meant to keep, and they would hug and go to bed. 

They never had sex on those nights. He’d said they shouldn’t sully their intimacy with something as trite and as clichéd as make-up-sex. So, they would cuddle and fall asleep in each other’s arms, and in the morning the world would be back where it belonged. 

If their disagreements weren’t exactly forgotten, the memory of them never held any heat. Their words might have been barbed and designed to wound when they had first erupted, but the trigger was usually some external aspect of their problematic lives, and the fuel was always concern or fear for the other. 

It took work to maintain relationships, he’d learnt, even without the unique pressures that they faced as a human and a werewolf living together. They’d had to weather hunters, going away to college, new jobs, omega skirmishes, pack territory incursions, the arrival of a wendigo family in town, and so much more, while under the constant pressure of trying to keep everyone safe and their human and werewolf worlds from colliding.

They lived a tangled mess of human complications and supernatural threats that could make taking on an alpha pack look like a toddler’s picnic. (Though Scott had once told him that picnics for small children were … no picnic, even if two of those children were your own.) 

Sometimes the stress was intense. Unremitting. But they were there for one another. And when it got really bad (and that usually meant when someone’s life was on the line) their combined determination to protect the other would see off the devil herself. There was no doubt about that. Never had been.

Almost from first they’d met, he’d known that he would be there for him, needed or not, and, strangely, he’d known that his commitment would be reciprocated. He couldn’t say how he’d known; what it was that had given him such certainty in the other’s support, but when he looked back, he could sometimes smell the chlorine of the high school pool. As the years passed, his conviction solidified; no matter the circumstances, this man would have his back. And he always had.

So, those three little words? They shouldn’t matter. They don’t matter. What they have doesn’t need words. It was more important than that; it transcended the need for uttered oaths. 

What were words really worth? They were just air after all. Hot air that could just as easily shout a lie as whisper a truth.

No, he didn’t need words. He knew what he had, and he would never cease to be humbled and amazed by it, and so, so grateful for it. For him. Grateful to him. No words in the history of human language, or sounds in the entire range of werewolf vocalization, could change that.

So why was he even thinking about this?

Why did he always do this: let his thoughts get hung up on something so petty? Always in the early hours of a waxing gibbous moon, between moon set and sun rise when he could barely make out his lover’s face, just the charcoal outline of his sleeping body in the purple shadows of their bed. Here, in the stillest, darkest moments he thought of those three words.

The shadow at his side shifted. 

“Hey. You awake?” a sleepy voice asked.

“Hmm.”

“Can’t sleep?”

He shrugged.

“That jiggle a ‘yes’? Figures. Full moon next week. C’mere.” 

Hands reached for him, pulling him down and wrapping him in a snug embrace.

“Shh. Sleep now, think later.”

Lips pressed against his temple and he gave in, settling into his lover’s arms, letting his eyes close against the need to examine the shadows for those reassuring, familiar features.

And then it came to him: he had been wrong.

Those three little words had been said, were being said still. They were shouted out in every touch, in every tiny comfort. They were murmured onto skin with each caress and every kiss. They were babbled in the nonsense of daily life and gasped in the heat of their passion. They were spoken plainly in the trust that they shared when neither had any cause to trust in Gods, much less in mortal creatures. 

So, yes, they won’t ever give voice to those stupid words. Not because the words aren’t meant; but because they are. 

Those words exist for them with more substance than air shaped by larynx, tongue and lips could ever achieve. Those three words live in everything that they are to one another. They are spoken unambiguously every day in small smiles and long looks, more eloquently than in any grand gesture, cacophonous claim or dropped knee declaration.

Even unvoiced, the words had bound their two broken souls together into something greater than their shattered pieces combined. 

Yes, he had been wrong. Those three little words where rapped out with every beat of their hearts.

“I love you, Stiles.”

“Right back attcha, big guy.”

He nodded against his lover’s neck.

“Derek?”

“Hmm?” 

“I love you, Derek Hale.”

“I know.”

He pressed his smile into warm skin.

“Derek?”

“Hmm?”

“Go to sleep.”


End file.
